How To Do Affiliate Marketing On Your Stage 1 Authority Site

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This is episode 5 of 7 of the Authority Hacker New Year Starter Series. If you haven’t been through the previous episodes, we suggest you go and check those out first.

What you will learn

What affiliate marketing is and how it works

The pros and cons of affiliate marketing

How affiliate marketing can help when selling your own products

How to research different affiliate products / services to recommend

How to create and structure content that does the selling for you

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is referring someone to a product or service in exchange for a referral fee.

Normally, you’ll be given a window of time for your referral to convert. As long as that person makes a purchase inside that window, you’ll get paid a commission.

Most affiliate programs offer a generous window (weeks or months), but the most common affiliate partner, Amazon, only allows 24 hours. It does, however, give you a cut of ANY products purchased inside that window – which is usually not the case with other programs.

While most people default to slapping ads on their site in order to make money, we recommend starting with affiliate marketing.

Pros And Cons Of Affiliate Marketing

Revenue per thousand visitors to your site (RPM) is very high with the right kind of content and traffic

ZERO upfront costs

You don't need a ton of traffic to make decent money

You can write about a wide variety of products

You take advantage of pre-built sales funnel

You can't build a buyers list, offer up-sells, cross-sells, etc.

Your revenue source can disappear because of someone else's decision

Your commissions can be lowered at any time

You have no control over the quality and service being provided

Selling Your Own Products

If for some reason you choose not to go with affiliate marketing, you could sell your own products instead. That could be physical products, digital products or even services.

These alternatives offer a higher RPM but there’s a lot more work involved. You need to think about processing payments, customer service, actually delivering the product, etc.

Not to mention testing and developing sales pages and sales funnels, and the cost that goes along with that. Of course, you need to consider your revenue per hour (RPH) when looking at these options, because you could end up spending a lot more of your time to make a little extra money.

The good thing about starting with affiliate marketing is you can figure out what sells before investing time and money into your own products.

Researching Products

Before diving into content creation, you should always research which products are available.

This approach allows you to structure content around products you know you can potentially recommend to your visitors.

You can also use Google to find private affiliate programs. Most companies have an affiliate program, even if they don’t advertize it.

Let Your Content Do The Selling

The way you make affiliate sales is through your content.

The idea is to look for high buying intent keywords. Find what you’re going to sell and create the content that sells it, not the other way around.

We recommend taking a few different product categories related to one topic and see where the bulk of the search volume is, for example:

Paintball masks

Paintball guns

Paintball grenades

You should also consider creating solution-oriented content. As in, content that solves problems but also makes sense to recommend a product or service, for example:

How to protect your eyes during paintball

How to repair a paintball gun

What are the best paintballs?

Reviewing Products

Since the bulk of your sales will come from product review style articles, it’s important to understand the process behind that.

If you’re going to be reviewing a large number of products, it’s just not practical to buy each one and manually review them. That’s why we leverage the advice of trusted sources like Top10reviews.com and Outdoorgearlabs.com, because they’ve already reviewed the product.

Essentially, we do the research, filter out the irrelevant information and present the facts to our audience in a more digestible way.

Structuring Your Content

The first thing you want, right at the top of the page, is a table with your product rankings or specifications clearly laid out with affiliate links.

This helps people who don’t want to read the entire article find your recommendation quickly, and click through to make the purchase.

The bulk of your article should be the buyers guide. This is where you give the reader genuine advice on what to buy and why they should be it. Weigh up the pros and cons and give logical reasons why they should pick X over Y.

Outsourcing Content

Starting out, we think you should have at least 50 articles written for the launch of your site. They don’t need to be published, but at least pre-written.

It’s also important that you write some of these yourself, not only to get a feel for the market, but to develop a content creation process that you can later outsource.

As for where to go to for outsourced content, we recommend the following:

I was hoping you guys would elaborate a little bit about your negativity toward Bluehost. I haven’t had any trouble with them and had been promoting them as an affiliate – but if it’s going to undermine my credibility …

Many people recommend Bluehost as the best hosting option because they pay the most amount of money through their affiliate program. If you look at most honest hosting reviews which actually compare things like speed fairly across multiple platforms then you’ll see that almost all these reviews are quite negative towards Bluehost. E.g: https://hostingfacts.com/hosting-reviews/bluehost/

/Edit 25th July 2018 – It seems Hostingfacts have changed their tune and now recommend bluehost as #1. #sellout

Btw,that Hosting Facts site is one of the best review sites I’ve ever seen and their organic keyword rankings are insane. The site is built so professional that you can’t really tell at first glance it’s even an affiliate site until you dig way deep and realize they are making money by pushing hosting. I think it’s a great example of an excellent “review” sites that isn’t Amazon in terms of design etc and a lot of noobs can learn from it. I have a feeling these guys started out doing Amazon sites and then branched on to hosting and other niches because there’s no way a beginner could have the budget to launch and rank a site like that.